For twelve weeks I have been on C.N.N. as a consultant, speaking about MH370, pingers, Ferguson gunshot analysis of recordings, analysis of foreign terrorist videos, and a number of other newsworthy recordings. One day, while on vacation with family, I was contacted in the middle of the night and asked to verify gunshots heard in the background of a recording. By 6 A.M. I was on the air by Skype, and then on-air again seven times that day, with waveform displays that I had produced, using my laptop computer.

International Intrigue

A well-known TV News network asked me to examine a Micro-SD card (15 x 12.5 mm) that had come from an international high-profile figure. I detected some music and conversation files which I digitally enhanced. Then, using special forensic techniques, I searched for deleted files. After some time I was able to recover 10 deleted video files, and 14 deleted photos, some showing other individuals. The content is now being evaluated.

The Sandy Hook School Shootings at Newtown, Connecticut

Using the recorded 911 calls from the school as well as two-way radio recordings, I was asked to determine a precise time for each audible gunshot as well as whether different types of weapons could be determined from the recordings. With sophisticated forensic digital tools I was able to pinpoint the times of gunshots to within one ten-thousandth of a second. This was a rare instance in which I suppressed the speech, and focused on the background sounds.

Nintendo and a Bright Little Girl

A mother came to me saying that she believed her daughter was being treated inappropriately verbally be her ex-husband. The child had the presence of mind to record using a Nintendo game station unit. After some consultation with Nintendo engineers, and experimentation, the recordings were succeffully downloaded and converted to a form suited for litigation.

A Young Man, A Doctor, and a Recorder

AYoung man who had undergone serious back surgery was left in constant pain allegedly because of a botched surgical procedure. In subsequent follow-up visits, the doctor admitted that he had made mistakes. The patient had recorded the meeting, and the recording was used during trial, wherein he was subsequently awarded a settlement.

Branch Davidian Trials at Waco – Criminal and Civil

In 1993 I was contacted by the U.S.
Department of Justice to assist in clarifying the tapes of bugs smuggled
into the Branch Davidian compound during the standoff, in preparation
for the upcoming criminal trial. I was provided copy cassettes and
asked to prepare the clearest enhanced copies, as well as the most
accurate and complete transcripts of the conversations between David
Koresh and his followers.

Paul Ginsberg at FBI Engineering Research Facility.

The assignment sounded simple although
the tapes turned out to be the most difficult of my career. There
was considerable confusion, firearms were being discharged, tanks
were advancing, and everyone was wearing a gas mask, resulting in
muffled voices. Nevertheless, using state-of-the-art equipment, I
produced enhanced copies and transcripts. The tapes contained conversation
with multiple clear references to “lighting it up, get the Coleman
fuel, etc”.

When I arrived at the trial I was given
access to the original tapes briefly and made some last minute corrections.
After testifying, the jury returned with convictions

Then, six years later I again received
a call from Washington informing me that a civil trial was scheduled.
I was asked to again prepare the clearest enhanced copies and most
accurate transcripts. In the time that had passed the state-of-the-art
in the field of forensic audio had advanced considerably. By this
time I had outfitted the lab with new digital enhancement equipment.
In order to produce the best tapes I requested access to the original
tapes. The photo shows me at the Federal Bureau of Investigation laboratory
at Quantico, preparing digital noise-free distortion-less copies for
me to use back at my lab. While there I was treated royally and given
a tour of Hogan’s Alley, the training facility with the “most
robbed bank in the world”.

Back at P.A.L., after considerable experimentation to optimize intelligibility,
I produced superior digitally enhanced copies and transcripts. The
trial at Waco was electrically charged, and heat-melted machineguns
as exhibits in the court room were chilling and reminded me of the
Holocaust Museum in Washington. After testifying, the jury decided
in favor of the Government.

Woody Allen v. Mia Farrow

I received a call from Woody Allen’s
attorneys asking for assistance. Briefly, Woody was accused of allegedly
physically abusing his young daughter. There was a videotape purporting
to show his daughter talking to Mia about Woody’s actions. After
some negotiations I was permitted to examine the original videocassette
for discontinuities and irregularities at the lab. I testified that
the tape was actually composed of 12 distinct recordings made at different
times and at a variety of locations. Thus, the child could have been
coached between segments.

This is a courtroom sketch of my testimony at trial. Woody and Mia
are in the center. This sketch was done by Christine Cornell and was
broadcast on NBC television.

Woody, the man, was like a young boy
in a man’s body. I gave him a gift of a kaleidoscope, and he
opened the package with the excitement of a boy on Christmas (or Hannukah)
morning. A complex man to say the least.

John DiGilio – Mob Boss

John DiGilio was the a real life Tony
Soprano. He ran Bayonne. I heard him say “Bayonne is mine”
on a wiretap. I was retained by the Government to testify as to my
enhancement of undercover bug tapes of some of his conversations.

The tapes were made using a secretly
hidden surveillance recorder worn by an undercover agent. Unfortunately
the batteries were almost depleted at the time of the meeting. Most
of the conversation was recorded, at which point the recorder stopped
dead. The agent, unaware, turned it off while Mr. DiGilio left the
car they were in, and turned it on again as he approached again. It
ran for another few minutes before dying again. At trial I testified
about the battery depletion and showed how it was similar to an almost-dead
car battery, recharging a little between attempts to start a car with
the bad battery.

During trial Mr. DiGilio’s attorney
asked me if I knew him. I said that he was one of the only attorneys
that I ever had to sue to recover a fee, having worked with him several
years earlier. During a recess in the hall, Mr. DiGilio lunged at
me, and in so doing, collapsed in the courthouse, with a heart condition.
Law enforcement agents said “we’ve been trying to get
this guy off the streets for years, and you just did it”. After
a recess of a week or so, Mr. DiGilio was convicted.

The Texaco Tapes

I was retained by the team representing
Texaco, Inc. Tapes had been made by a Texaco employee using a hidden
microcassette recorder. The conversation was thought to contain racial
slurs. Including a reference to “niggers”. I traveled
to the F.B.I. office at New Rochelle, N.Y. where I was given access
to the original microcassettes. After making digital copies, I returned
to my lab and, after some experimentation, I produced clear digitally
enhanced copies. The conversation turned out to be one about holidays
and the specific phrase was “St. Nicholas”. Hannukah and
Kwanza were discussed, as well.
Following this discovery, there was no further allegation of any slurs
of any kind.

Bear Gall Bladders
apparently are used as aphrodisiacs in Korea. An elderly gentleman
and his wife were captured on videotape in a sting operation in Virginia
where an undercover agent gutted a black bear and packaged the gall
bladder for his client. My job was to clarify the audio from the videotape,
which was muddy as a result of poor microphone placement.
I will always remember this case because I was watching the videotapes
in the conference room of the U.S. Attorney’s office in Charlottesville,
Virginia on the morning of September 11th when people burst into the
room to tell us to switch to CNN for the news.

The “Boss” and the Roadies Two roadies
of a well-known rock singer who we will call “the boss”,
became disenchanted with their employment. One of them recorded a
discussion with the “boss”, in effect, giving notice of
quitting, and airing their grievances. The roadie recorded the conversation.
When he produced it, he had no explanation for the missing portions
of the conversation. After an examination I found that the tape had
been erased in places, subsequent to the original conversation. Despite
the boss giving each of the roadies ten thousand dollars per year
worked with him, the two sued. Case closed.

Get Out of Jail Free? A fellow was in jail for car
theft with just three months remaining to serve. He was impatient
to get out, so he called the local F.B.I. office posing as an out
of town agent requesting to use him as an informant on the street.
He asked the local agent to get him out of jail as soon as he could.
The wheels started to turn, and plans were being made to release him
early when, one alert agent asked him whether he had worked with any
agents in the local office recently. He named an agent who had arrested
him years ago and said that he had talked to him a few weeks earlier.
Unfortunately, for him, the agent had passed away a year ago. When
the agents came to release him, he was re-arrested and given two additional
years in jail. The telephone calls from jail were recorded on a multi-channel
machine. I downloaded the conversations at the jail, and enhanced
them for confirmation that the inmate was in fact, the caller. Go
directly (back) to jail.

The Billionaire

Attorneys for a certain billionaire
who shall remain nameless (let’s just call him Donald) contacted
me about a telephone conversation that he had with another casino
owner in Atlantic City. It seems that the other casino owner had purchased
a parking lot one block from his casino and intended to build an elevated
walkway across Donald’s property. There was some discussion,
and then the other casino owner later, under oath, accused Donald
of being abusive and cursing during the telephone call, not realizing
that Donald had recorded the conversation. I was called in to examine
the recording for discontinuities. I found that the recording was
continuous, and the man’s credibility was severely diminished.

The Teacher and The Killer

Karen Weinstein, a teacher and mother,
in New Jersey, was studying to become an assistant principal. She
used a small micro-cassette recorder to record her notes in preparation
for her assistant principal exam. One night she made the mistake of
stopping at a strip mall for a sandwich. A young man carjacked her
and drove off with her in the car, threatening to kill her as he drove
to a deserted area. He told her that he wanted the car, and she told
him to take it while pleading for him not to hurt her. Somehow, despite
being terrified, she managed to record a good amount of the conversation
using her microcassette recorder.

Tragically, her body was found some
time later, along with the microcassette. After a preliminary examination
by the State forensic lab, the tape was sent to me for further study.
After careful examination and digital enhancement I was able to recover
an additional 22 minutes of conversation, including information useful
in making a positive identification of the killer. He later pleaded
guilty, saying that he wanted the car for his birthday.

The Dumpster Baby

Two college sweethearts from different
schools found themselves in serious trouble when the girlfriend discovered
that she was about to have a baby. She called and left a message on
her boyfriend’s answering machine, hysterical, saying that she
hoped that her worst nightmare wasn’t coming true and to get
over there right away. The message was very noisy and distorted. The
baby’s lifeless body was later found in a dumpster.

The tape was sent to the state lab as
well as to the F.B.I. lab before coming to P.A.L. Aftr careful enhancement
I was able to recover additional information. A plea agreement was
ultimately agreed to, by all parties.

The Bikers in Jersey

A number of bikers placed ads in newspapers
advertising for “models” to lure girls to their “party”
house for sex. The girls were fed alcohol and qualuudes to put them
in a semi-conscious state. They were then gang-raped. The bikers,
in their infinite wisdom, videotaped the sessions, and in several
cases actually attempted to extort money from some of the girls by
threatening to show the tapes to the girls’ families if they
didn’t empty their bank accounts and pay them. One girl’s
recollection of the vents led to a search warrant , in which the self-made
evidence videocassettes were seized.

The prosecutor’s office engaged
me to enhance the audio and prepare discovery copies for trial. Ultimately,
all defendants pleaded guilty and none of the girls had to be subjected
to a painful trial. The bikers were sent to Rahway state prison for
long prison terms.

Everything From Birth to Death

I once said that, over the last 28 years
I have heard everything from birth to death as well as everything
in between. The birth was recorded on a videotape made by an expectant
father in the hospital delivery room. Unfortunately there were complications,
and resulting litigation. The videotape was used, after enhancement,
to show which procedures were performed by the medical staff during
the delivery.

The death was during an undercover meeting
being taped in a car by an agent posing as a city official about to
take a payoff in return for giving a target illegal taxicab medallions.
During the conversation there was a crashing sound as a man, committing
suicide jumped from a building and landed on the car in front of the
wired vehicle. Obviously the undercover conversation ended there.
The last thing heard on the tape was a woman screaming “Oh my
God……………………look what
he did to my car”.

Unscrambling a Heroin Dealer’s Conversation

Many years ago a stockbroker friend
gave me a present of an “antique” telephone scrambler
that he had found in the closet of new office space on Wall Street.
He had heard that it had been owned by a fellow who was involved with
the “mob” and who was later found shot dead. I put it
on the shelf and didn’t give it another thought.

About 5 years passed and the U.s. Department
of Justice brought me a tape of a telephone call that had been intercepted,
between several known heroin dealers, one in the United States and
one in Europe. The problem was that it was scrambled. The voices sounded
like squawks. No amount of enhancement was going to help because this
was clearly not a case of speech plus noise, but rather one of intentionally
encrypted voice. The attorneys asked whether it was possible to decode
the conversation.

After dusting off the old scrambler,
I powered it up and began to experiment with different combinations
of the encryption controls. After some time the voices became clear,
first Mickey Mouse-like, and then more naturally sounding, and a conversation
regarding flights and a rendezvous was downloaded and copied. The
defendants pleaded guilty shortly thereafter.

Agents and Informants

Some time ago the internal security
division of a federal law enforcement agency suspected two agents
of dealing in illegal substances as well as selling information on
informants. Rooms were bugged and a video camera was installed at
the agents’ computer desks, and a log was kept of times when
the agents logged onto the informant files, and for how long. Conversations
were recorded and the tapes were enhanced. The agents went to jail;
a sad day indeed.

Scrambling a Witness’s
Testimony

There was a labor investigation in which
a number of witnesses of illegal activities came forward but refused
to testify for fear of reprisals. I was contacted by the judge who
asked whether there was some way to disguise their voices as they
provided testimony from an undisclosed location supervised by attorneys
on behalf of the judge.

I designed a system that allowed all
attorneys to speak clearly by telephone while the witnesses‘
voices were changed so as to be non-identifiable while all parties
could hear each other. Thus, the safety of the witnesses was maintained
while the facts were entered into evidence.

Turning Donald Duck into a Judge

New York Chief Judge Sol Wachtler was
having an affair. When the lady involved ended the affair, the Judge,
wanting to continue, kept calling his lady friend. Then one day she
received a threatening call from someone using a voice changer. The
voice was distorted and clearly had been changed using an electronic
device.

Federal prosecutors gave me the tape
and asked whether I could unscramble the conversation. Using a computer
as well as several consumer speech changers I was able to restore
the voice along with a stable hum recorded at the time of the conversation.
This hum signal served as a reference to tell me that the scrambling
had been successfully reversed. Lo and behold, the voice on the phone
was that of the judge.

Going Postal in California

In San Francisco there was a rash of
post office robberies. A group called the Bailey gang specialized
in breaking into post office safes and stealing cash and stamps. The
government arrested one of the gang and convinced him to work undercover.
He recorded conversations both on the telephone as well as in person,
plotting future robberies.

The informant was a colorful character.
He named his son Sam Quentin, after the place where he had spent considerable
time. He had “made in Taiwan” tattooed on his heel, “like
the little statues in the tourist shops”. His testimony along
with tapes of his conversations to corroborate his testimony resulted
in convictions of these postal predators.

The Bikers

A number of the Hells Angels, including
Sonny Barger, their leader, were on trial
In San Francisco. The charges were conspiracy, illegal firearms, narcotics,
etc. My family was with me on this trip to the west coast. One day,
one of the defendants picked up a table and attempted to throw it
across the courtroom. For the balance of the trial he watched the
proceedings by closed-circuit television from his cell.

One night, supporters of the Hells Angels
killed a pig and left its blood-smeared head at the door of the Federal
courthouse. That day I shipped my family off to visit relatives, and
stayed in a different hotel each night checked in under an assumed
name. All defendants were convicted.

Yachts and Jets in Jail

Irwin Feiner was a con man. His modus
operandi was to purchase yachts and jets and overfinance them by getting
them appraised for more than their actual value. He would then take
a half million dollars from the loan proceeds and hide it. The jet
or yacht would be leased for a while and then he would default on
the loan payments. And then he would go to the next bank and start
all over again.

The amazing thing about this scheme
was that he continued it while in jail. He called bank officers and
explained the echoing of the prison saying he was at his health club.
All telephone calls at the prison were recorded on a 40-channel tape
but there was no way to determine which of the thousands of inmate
phone calls were from Feiner. Each large reel had the capacity of
recording 40 telephone lines for 24 hours.

My job was to design a system to automatically
detect all of the touch tones of the phone calls, download them into
a computer, compare them with the known 105 telephone numbers Feiner
was known to call, and output a printout of the relevant phone call
dates, times and channels for review and downloading of the pertinent
conversations.

I had just visited the laboratories
of Thomas Edison, one of my personal heroes, and I had purchased his
complete papers and memoirs. I remember reading Edison’s papers
that Sunday afternoon and then taking a nap. When I awoke, somehow
I knew exactly how to design the system. I remember looking at the
book as I woke up and saying “ thanks Tom”.

We had our initial output two weeks
later and ultimately Feiner was convicted of fraud while in jail.

The Hit Kit Kid

In Miami a misguided young man aspired
to become a part of organized crime. He decided to manufacture “hit
kits” to be used for assassinations. Each kit consisted of a
black attaché case with a concealed Ruger pistol equipped with
a silencer, and a ring near the handle to fire the gun. He even put
black electrical tape over the firing hole so that the case looked
authentic from any angle. All the killer needed to do was to walk
by the intended victim in a crowded location, and suddenly the target
would fall as if he had suffered a heart attack.

Agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco,
and Firearms had this man under surveillance on foot, by phone and
from helicopters. At an appropriate time the man was arrested and
some of his “hit kits” were seized. The amazing part of
this case was the selling price of these assassination kits……
$300 each. Risk vs. reward. He received 20 years.

The Million Dollar Conversation – In The Mud

During the course of multimillion dollar
brokerage transactions, conversations are routinely recorded not for
“instructional purposes” as the pre-recorded messages
woule have you believe, but rather for insurance for the recording
party in the event that there is a difference of opinion as to recollection
of details after the fact.

In this case there was a multi-million
dollar conversation that was recorded on a 60 channel logging recorder.
Unfortunately the bank of amplifiers containing the fateful channel
19 malfunctioned. The tape, when played back, sounded blank with just
a little noise and no trace of a conversation.

My assignment was to retrieve the conversation,
if possible. First I modified the recorder to run at quadruple speed
since the faster a tape crosses a tape head, the higher its output.
Next, I designed low-distortion amplifiers to lower the noise floor.
Finally I had a recording head manufacturer design a custom channel
19 only head with closer tape to head contact. With all of these modifications,
and considerable experimentation, followed by digital enhancement,
we were able to retrieve about 95% of this “almost lost”
conversation. I felt like a true “audio archeologist”.

White House – Coffee Anyone ?

The U.S. Senate Committee on Governmental
Affairs retained me to determine whether there were any signs of tampering
of tapes recorded at the White House to document the President’s
various activities. Specifically at issue were tapes of White House
coffee chats arranged with high-level political donors. I first met
with attorneys at the Senate, and then went to the White House where
I was given access to the original tapes. Copies were made and tests
were run back at the lab. It was determined that the tapes reflected
various segments of recordings but that there was no evidence of tampering
or editing. I reported these findings in an appearance on the CNN
program Politics Today.

The Nixon Tape – The Missing 18 Minutes

The National Archives is the custodian
of the original Nixon tapes recorded at the White House, including
the tape on which 18 minutes have been erased. On this the 30th anniversary
of Watergate, the National Archives has decided to invite qualified
forensic scientists to participate in a feasibility study to determine
the likelihood of retrieving the missing 18 minutes of conversation.

The plan was to distribute two preliminary
recorded and subsequently erased tapes of increasing similarity to
the actual tape, to insure that an examined tape is preserved with
no damage to it as a result of any examination, and also to evaluate
the product of laboratory techniques used in attempting to recover
recorded speech that has been erased.

Currently, we have just received the
second preliminary tape, and are in the process of examining it, in
preparation to attempting to do our “magic. Stay tuned for results.

Conclusion

I’ve tried to give you a
glimpse into the life of a tape expert, illustrating the different
types of cases that I deal with on a daily basis. In addition, there
are lectures to law enforcement in the use of tapes during investigations,
and an ongoing dialogue with surveillance and recorder manufacturers
so as to insure that the tapes recorded are valid legally as bona
fide evidence in courts of law, along with supporting expert testimony.